Friday, July 18, 2014

Top 5 SEO myths you should put to grave in 2014

1. I must submit my site to Google

We keep hearing this from our so called “SEO Gurus” that we will have to submit our site to Google in order to Rank or inform the search engines to crawl our website. Even If you are not submitting your site to Google, the crawler is always in hunt for the fresh content on web and will find your site. What you should be worrying about is the robots.txt file to inform the crawler about what part of your website you don’t want to be crawled or indexed so that your real content takes the lead. (You can exclude pages such as your lead management system or any confidential section of your website)

Well I will not say anything on this; let me quote Google when they announced way back in 2009 that “Meta description (along with Meta keywords) has no bearing on search rankings”. Having said this I would also like to point out that effective description tag will have an impact on what user clicks and what not as this description comes below the link of your website in Google search results. So if your description is not good or catchy enough to grab the attention, User might click on other links. Try using few (1-2) of your keywords in the description which might match the user query and will appear bold!

“So stop stuffing your description tags with hell lot of keywords, Make it more human friendly”

3. SEO and Social media aren't related at all

Gone are the days when Google was not considering the social footprints in its search results. This is quite evident from the fact that Google is giving importance to authorship and Google plus presence. The intersection of SEO and social media is social search. Your social search content gets prioritized if it’s related with you socially. It could be a facebook friend or page, twitter follower, local Google places listing or relation with any other major social media.

“Make sure that Social media is a part of your overall SEO strategy”

4. Keywords need to be an exact match

Seriously..???? This is 2014 and Google has evolved it’s algorithm from just being returning answers to specific set of keywords to understanding the humanly language. Google doesn’t focus only on the exact keywords but it also considers the synonyms and the content wrapped around these keywords.

“Stop using the same keywords again and again – think humanly”

5. The H1 is the most important on page element

I bet you would have heard this often from SEO experts. Webpage has a predefined structure for presenting the information to users and search engines. What title tag (H1, H2, H3 etc.) your headline is wrapped in has little to no influence on your overall SEO strategy, it’s only for styling purpose in CSS (Custom Style Sheet) what matters more is how quickly and effectively you are communicating the page features to your visitor. Stop using H1 as the god father of on page SEO.

“It’s important that you use only one H1 tag, If you have more subtitles you can accommodate the same in H2, H3 etc.”

Do you know any other such SEO myths? Feel free to share it in the comments :)